The invention relates to a circuit interconnecting device, for use in industrial applications comprising a plurality of peripheral units which are electrically connected with at least one terminal wiring board, which is in turn connected in output to control devices.
In the industrial field the sheer number of circuits is enormous, rendering wiring-up of often very varied devices an expensive exercise, especially with respect to control panels.
The above is especially relevant with regard to industrial applications where a plurality of peripheral devices have to be wired up with minute care on at least one mainboard, normally situated at the boxed control panel.
This mainboard receives all of the wires coming from the plurality of peripheral devices, all of which are different from one another and obviously have interfaces which are also more or less equally varied.
Bearing in mind the above, it can be seen that the ordering of the various connection wires, bringing them to the respective interface and connecting them up to the mainboard or mainboards is a considerably complicated task.
The task is even more complicated in situations where in-house security systems are concerned, since by their nature these require a heterogeneous plurality of sensors distributed over a whole industrial plant: here the assembly of all the wires on the mainboard is extremely complicated.
For the above reasons devices have been realized which attempt to overcome those problems by wiring the various sensors and/or peripheral devices to groups of like types.
A previous patent by the same applicant, Italian patent no. 2230A/90, solved this problem in part by realizing an interconnecting device which allowed the plurality of wires to be connected in a simple and orderly fashion, so that the origin of each single wire could easily be determined.
This mainboard, however, was not universally applicable to each control apparatus existing in plants downstream of the mainboard itself. In fact, for every control apparatus there had to be an interface for connecting up to the wires in output from the mainboard.
More precisely, once all of the wires originating from the peripheral devices had been orderedly arranged on the mainboard, the signals from the wires had to be transferred to outputs which by their nature are very heterogeneous, ranging from internal security circuits to fire-detecting and prevention circuits to movement circuits, and so on.
The prior art offers simple solutions to these problems, realizing a dedicated connection for each individual case, which, according to the type of application, permits an interconnection wiring to match the signals present.
More in detail, the interfacing of the wires in output from the mainboard is actuated towards a centralized control unit, utilizing specially constructed connectors specified for that particular application and utilizable only for a given plant.
This type of realization, obviously, presents both operative and structural limitations.
From the operative point of view, the supplier is obliged to realize interfaces and interconnectors having circuitries that, being dedicated, can be used only for a given application, and which in commercial terms cannot be made such as to be universally applicable.
Further, from the structural point of view, the above-described dedicated realizations cause problems of stocking and warehousing, since the industrial plant managers have necessarily to keep in a good stock of very specific exchange parts, thus running into high stock numbers.
Finally, since the hardware structures are generally made in accordance with manufacturers' standardizations, presently available interconnecting and interfacing devices are utilizable only in connection with the devices realized by a same manufacturer.
To summarize, the limits of the prior art consist in the fact that the interconnecting devices at present in use are inextricably linked to the choices of hardware made by the supplier and also that within a single typology it is not possible to readapt an item of hardware as it is too dedicated and therefore not liable to reutilization.